Why I Don't Trust Government-Backed 'Gun Violence' Research

Paul Hsieh
, ContributorI cover health care and economics from a free-market perspective.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

After the recent mass shootings in Orlando, Florida, the American Medical Association renewed its call to lift the 20-year ban prohibiting the federal government’s Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from performing research into “gun violence.”

The lack of gun violence research at the CDC is attributed to the Dickey amendment, a rider on a 1996 bill which prohibits the organization from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control”... [A]lthough the language does not expressly prohibit research on gun violence, the amendment combined with the dearth of funding for such research has caused a de facto ban.

However, supporters of the funding ban argue that the CDC is hardly unbiased on this issue. In a 2013 piece, Forbes contributor Larry Bell noted:

There was a very good reason for the gun violence research funding ban. Virtually all of the scores of CDC-funded firearms studies conducted since 1985 had reached conclusions favoring stricter gun control. This should have come as no surprise, given that ever since 1979, the official goal of the CDC’s parent agency, the U.S. Public Health Service, had been “…to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership”, starting with a 25% reduction by the turn of the century.

Ten senators who strongly supported the CDC gun research funding ban put their reasons in writing: “This research is designed to, and is used to, promote a campaign to reduce lawful firearms ownership in America… Funding redundant research initiatives, particularly those which are driven by a social-policy agenda, simply does not make sense.”

Dr. Timothy Wheeler of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership also distrusts the CDC on this issue. He told CNN that the CDC is “fundamentally biased against gun ownership” and has advocated researching strategies to “reduce the number of guns in the United States by prohibiting gun ownership.” He listed several examples of anti-gun bias by the CDC in his 2015 piece for The Hill, “Why Congress stopped gun control activism at the CDC.”

For example, before the Congressional funding restrictions, then-CDC official Mark Rosenberg explicitly said his goal was to create a public perception of gun ownership as something “dirty, deadly — and banned.” The agency bias was so bad that Congress had to tell CDC officials that it “does not believe that it is the role of the CDC to advocate or promote policies to advance gun control initiatives, or to discourage responsible private gun ownership.”

Sloppy medical research into “gun violence” isn’t confined to the CDC. A 2016 article published in the highly prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet attempted to argue that passing three specific gun control laws could cut firearms deaths by 90%. Even other gun violence researchers sympathetic to gun control have called these results “implausible” and “just not good science”:

The paper, published in the British medical journal The Lancet and written by researchers at Boston University, Columbia University and the University of Bern in Switzerland, found that one of the three most effective gun policies were laws requiring ballistic imaging or microstamping, which help law enforcement identify guns used in crimes.

Experts noted that the laws, which were on the books in only three states, were not actually being implemented in practice. That “would be the biggest red flag, obviously, when they’re finding huge effects of a law that doesn’t exist” [emphasis mine], Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said.

Although this particular new paper did not come from the CDC, it is an example of the sort of sloppy science I fear we will see more of if current CDC funding restrictions are lifted.

I am both a physician and a gun owner. As an emergency radiologist working in a level 1 trauma center, I’ve diagnosed more gunshot injuries than I can count in my 20+ years of practice. I’ve seen the death and devastation that gun violence can wreak on innocent victims. It is precisely because this issue is so important, that I don’t want to see the debate over American gun policy distorted by bad science supported by a government agency with an anti-gun bias.

AR-15 rifles are displayed on the exhibit floor during the NRA annual meeting in Louisville, KY. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg